


The Kuvira Letters

by Karakhan



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Epistolary, Gen, Inexplicable Dream Sequences, Politics and War in a Time of Revolution!, Yet another fill-in fic for B3 and B4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-12
Updated: 2016-11-12
Packaged: 2018-08-30 14:47:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8537188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Karakhan/pseuds/Karakhan
Summary: A week before setting out for the state of Yi, in a state of some minor disquiet, Kuvira sits down and recollects all that has happened to her over the last three years.





	1. The Childhood of a Leader

**Author's Note:**

> Well, here it is, my first work of fiction after a decade of inactivity. Special thanks goes out to Selkit for inspiring me to get this silly thing researched and all typed out.

The worst parts are not the moments of action, when a thousand problems are buzzing at your head like a swarm of angry tick-gnats, when every situation is a crisis and everyone is demanding something of you. No, it’s the time between those moments, when the comfortable hum of work and routine deserts you, when the muscles grow slack and the mind grows lethargic, when there is nothing to _be_ done, period, and there is nothing but idleness and drift.

So it is with me, on what may be the first vacation I have ever taken in my life. It was Bataar’s idea, really; I had been gearing up to resolve this situation in Yi, but he insisted that it could wait a week. “We’ve been working nonstop for three years to rebuild the a continent; I think even the Great Uniter is entitled to one week of rest. It’ll be just like it was, when we’d sit on your bed and just talk about everything we planned to do.” I relented; Bataar may not have that famed Beifong hardheadedness, but he always knows the right thing to say to get me to change my mind.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. Bataar went back to Ba Sing Se the day after we arrived; General Li has been making a nuisance of himself over the new generation of avatar-mech, and I felt Bataar, as the chief liaison between the Technical-Industrial Yuan and the military, would be just the man to soothe ruffled feathers.  What this has meant for me, however, is that I’ve been spending the past three days in this frothy little manor house bored out of my mind. From what the local citizens have said, the place was built about thirty years ago by an enterprising spice merchant for his favorite mistress, which would certainly explain both the gaudy gold-and-teal exterior as well as all the questionable artwork on the walls. I do wonder what happened to them; by the time we arrived the house had been abandoned for some months, and it was easy to for the Kyoshis to install themselves in the guest house and check over the manor for any old surprises.

Most of the building is empty save for my part of the second floor. For the past few days my routine has been the same as always: rise with the sun, a run around the grounds, shower, hair, light breakfast, newspapers, a mixture of responding to reports from the Zhan apparatus and metalbending training for most of the day, closing off with a small dinner, shower, a book, then bed. In all honesty I could have stayed on the train and had the same vacation, even if I will admit that the sunrises on Chameleon Bay do live up to the poet Feng Tsu-Hian’s verse. Digging this old typewriter out of the attic has been the most exciting thing by far that has happened this week.

It has also been sorely needed, in ways I can’t even begin to describe.

I am not a diarist by trade. Some people like to make themselves an unwound scroll, to share every aspect of themselves with the world, to become a puppet of themselves. I have always found it better to keep things wound down, close to the vest. You never know who might be listening, after all, and an earnest revelation can spell ruin if the listener is allied against you. But still…

But still.

I have been troubled these last few months. All this work, this goodwill campaign and long-distance governing has been taking its toll. I find myself growing sharper, more irritable, tired and frustrated with everyone who argues or talks back. I’ve also started having lapses in concentration; yesterday Guard Lian was talking about rumors from home about Kyoshi Island applying to join the Earth Kingdom, and I somehow drifted through that conversation in a haze, only vaguely following her points. I’m finding myself more disconnected, uncertain, unclear about what I should be doing or why. I haven’t told Bataar about this, and in truth I do not want him to know. This is something personal, some conundrum wound deep into me, a creeper vine wrapped around me, threatening all my work. Over in the Republic, there’s this new trend of people paying analysts to sit and listen to them talk about their mental health; for myself I think this typewriter is a more than adequate physician; even now I notice my words are freer, my sentences more ornate than when I speak. (The continuing legacy, I suppose, of a good Zaofu education.)

So, Doctor CabCorp Rightwriter, let’s go back, far back, back to where it all started.

***

I had nothing to complain about in Zaofu. I had a warm bed, hot food, clean clothes, a city of teachers and artists that would love to do nothing more than reach out and nurture any precocious young girl. Compared to the rest of the Earth Kingdom, where the workhouse is the best possible outcome for any lost child, Zaofu would seem to have everything a little girl would need to become a talented, confident young woman, able to excel in any field of her choosing.

And yet I never quite fit into Zaofu. On my rounds, I’d walk through the core of Zaofu Central, around the great spire of City Hall, watch the sun reflect of the flowering form of the Haidian Building, hear the rattle of the elevated trams ferrying citizens between the estates, see young couples in robes, jewelry tinkling, murmuring of all the their plans for the future and picking out kebabs from streetcorner vendors. I walked the Niu estate, with its great factories and power plants, and I spent more time than I can remember in and out of the Beifong estate with its razor-cut grass and freeform sculptures. But of all the years I was there, from girl to woman, it has never been a home to me. A place to live, sure, and an ideal to hold and defend, most definitely, but it was never my place. When we started working in Ba Sing Se, the scribblers on both sides called me “the daughter of Zaofu,” a formally true phrase that always rankled me. I am not the daughter of Zaofu, or Suyin Beifong, or this, that, or the other. I am Kuvira, and that is who I am and all I need to be.

However, the problem with utopias is that they have a great deal of difficulty in digesting nonconformists. There was all the little things in school; children calling me “gorilla Kuvira” when I had to manhandle my name into Imperial script. Even today, I loathe whenever someone stumbles their way through “ _Guweila._ ” Then there were those that thought it was the height of comedy to ask about the tick under my eye, or ask if I was secretly a boy because of my voice. I didn’t really know how to manage my temper in those days, so I was responsible for more than my share of bloody noses. My parents, my _foster family_ , they didn’t really know what to do. In truth, we were a poor match for one another. Jung-won and Ji-hyun were a professional couple who’d been unable to conceive and wanted some adorable little moppet with a gap in her teeth and flowers in her braids; what they got was a moody bender girl halfway to adulthood. We never fought much, but over time neither of us what to do with one another, and so we drifted away, often going whole weeks without speaking to one another.

Still, while me and Ji-hyun still have our issues, I can thank Jung-won for opening me to the wonders of history. He was an assistant professor of Earth Kingdom history at the university, and his primary area of focus was the Fourth Intermediate Period, during the Kyoshi Yuga. Like all earthbending girls, I idolized Avatar Kyoshi. She was beautiful, bold, fearless, and could rip continents apart with her bare hands; everything a young girl wants to be. (I still think there’s an old photo floating around somewhere of me in sloppily-applied Kyoshi makeup for a festival, looking more like a tea-girl than an earthbending warrior.) Like everyone in Zaofu, I’d been told the story of her conflict with Chin the Conquerer, about how she faced his army at the Dian Isthmus and scattered them to the winds when she created Kyoshi Island. One day after school, back when I was about eleven, I asked Jung-Won to tell me some stories about Kyoshi. To my surprise, he told me that in a way, Chin was the more interesting figure. According to him, the Earth Kingdom of that time was going through one of its rougher periods when power had devolved to the provinces due to a succession of weak kings. In many of the southern provinces, centered around Gaoling, there was a great deal of industry centered around metalwork and mining, and in a few places there were a few experiments being done in using steam-driven engines to operate heavy machinery, years before the Fire Nation had inaugurated the First Mechanical Age. Unfortunately, as the Earth King reasserted control in the wake of Chin’s defeat, most of these ventures ended up being broken up under laws to protect local nobles, and the new machines became a dead end. Flushed with this knowledge, I went to school the next day and asked my history teacher Mrs. Song the obvious question: why didn’t Kyoshi join forces with Chin and make him the new Earth King. I phrased my question badly, and got a condescending lecture about the cruel idiocy of Chin and the Avatar’s role as a force of balance. Now, however, I think I understand what I was trying to ask. If Chin had become king, and if the mines of Gaoling had given birth to factories and locomotives, could the Mechanical Age have started in the Earth Kingdom, and with war machines of our own, could we have kept the Fire Nation from colonizing our land and starting the whole Hundred Year War in the first place?

History soon gave way to current affairs, and for a brief period in my teens I was quite the news hound.  There were a few local papers, but Zaofu’s Free Library had a respectable collection from around the world.  Oddly enough, while it was nothing to get last week’s paper from the Southern Water Tribe or the Republic, papers from Ba Sing Se or Omashu were always harder to track down. Not that the content made for inspiring reading; the world was in the midst of a Second Mechanical Age, but you wouldn’t be able to tell that from the Earth Kingdom. Engineers had perfected the small internal-combustion engine, the Northern Water Tribe plied the oceans of the world with their catamaran-hulled battleships, and the United Republic was the airship capital of the world, and what did we do? We sold them grain, we sold them wood, we sold them metal, and bought machines we could have built and designed ourselves. Meanwhile, Queen Hou-ting built her palaces and gardens, cut down the poor as they took to the streets to demand higher wages and safer working conditions, and did nothing as the Si Hong Desert and the Takalan Highlands in the north became nests of banditry. I was not surprised to see the state of the Earth Kingdom, but seeing the sheer scale of the disorder is something I would not truly understand until years later.

But there was more to life than ruminating over national decline. There was also metalbending, the ostensible reason I had ended up in Zaofu. In that I had the great honor of being trained by Suyin Beifong herself. Suyin…

Suyin. Even three years later, even after all that’s come between us, I still don’t know what to say about her. She took me in, gave me a home, and taught me how to hone my metalbending, to feel the earth in the meteor, then the carbon in the steel. After seeing my problems with the other children, she enrolled me in a dance troupe, giving me something to do to work out my energy and take my bending in new directions. There is so much I owe to her, and so much I never thanked her for doing.

But at the same time…at the same time, it seemed like there was another side to Suyin, existing just behind the smiles and the encouragement. She always had this way of steamrolling disagreement; if someone made plans she didn’t approve, she’d offer a chipper “oh nonsense!” and explain how _she_ wanted things done.  For more recalcitrant subjects, she had this habit of arguing and explaining until the other person was worn down into submission. It was the method she used on me after she to convince me to join her dance class, and while it taught me so much, it took a long time before I forgave her for it. When she was _really_ angry, oh, then the other person would stop being a person at all and just become a node of evil on which she could project all her hatred. I got a little taste of _that_ side when I decided to join the city guard at sixteen. My foster parents were perplexed, naturally, but Suyin was upset in a way I’d never seen before. She claimed I had potential as a great dancer, and I was “throwing my life away” to become a “brain-dead beat cop.”

The more I think about it, the more I think Su is a limited personality that invests a lot of time and energy in disguising herself. She speaks of Zaofu being one great family, but there is clearly a difference between the Zaofu family and _the_ family. She extols the virtues of republican government and new technology, but the only thing she’s done on the world stage is foster little “Zaofu Society” study groups across the Earth Kingdom. The city is open to everyone, but we lock our domes at night. Zaofu society is riven with all these contradictions and hidden rules, and while I was there I felt like I was the only one who noticed them.

As it turned out, most of family was quite willing to go along with Suyin’s consenus. As one of Su’s protégés, I spent a fair amount of time on the Beifong estate, and in the course of events I spent a great deal of time with her family. While I appreciated how close they were, I didn’t really get along with most of them. Wing and Wei were obsessed with games even as kids, and I’ve never really seen the point of any activity where everything can be erased and reset in an instant, while Opal just seemed scared of me for some reason. Huan was Huan; he had some of the same inklings as me that all was not well in the world that I had, but he looked to art as his medium of ecumenical salvation. We’d occasionally argued politics, and I tried to get a handle on his conception of art, which culminated in becoming the model for his Assemblist painting _Dancer Descending a Staircase_ , but ultimately we were just of different worlds.

As for Bataar, well, what can I say about him that I haven’t already told him? The first time he ever really spoke to me was on the eight anniversary, and for whatever reason I just opened up to him. We started talking after that, and I slowly got to see a side of him I hadn’t noticed before, of a brilliant technician stuck as his father’s assistant, and of an eldest son, filled with such promise as a child, only to be overshadowed by his more brilliant siblings. There was one evening where he confessed that there were some days he felt like his only purpose in life was to be the prototype for his “useful” siblings, and I swear I nearly broke down and cried over that. We began to help each other, mostly in coming up with ways to deal with Su, but as the years wound on we only grew closer and closer.

For me, the guard was exactly what I had been looking for all my life. We had camaraderie, closeness, directives, procedures, and clear lines of authority. I rose in the ranks steadily, and finally made captain by the time I was twenty-two. Bataar and even Su congratulated me, but even then I felt there was something of a chill. All else being equal I would probably be running the Zaofu Guard by my thirties and…then what? Four decades of drills? Should I leave Zaofu and enlist somewhere else? What about Bataar? With no clear answer, I began to drift for the next two years, falling into the mindless comfort of routine.

Then, eight days after my twenty-fourth birthday, everything changed with Harmonic Convergence. Most of the events passed us in Zaofu by, save for the surprise of Opal waking up with airbending one morning. The Beifongs held a great dinner in celebration, but the news hit Bataar particularly hard, as she was the only other one of his siblings who couldn’t bend. The news soon brought Avatar Korra and Su’s estranged sister Lin to pay a visit, and I do regret that I didn’t have the time to properly meet either of them. However, what I remember the most from that year, what I will take to my grave, is the Red Lotus. In the space of a month they melted the Beifong estate, choked Queen Hou-ting to death like a dog, destroyed the Northern Air Temple, came within a hair’s breadth of ending the avatar cycle, and left the avatar half-broken in a wheelchair. If there is one thing I learned from all this (beyond the fact that Suyin didn’t trust me enough to fight alongside her), is that there are times when all are plans can come to naught, when all our schemes are inadequate, and we are nothing but particles whirling in the wind. I was in charge of security for the Beifong estate, but all my plans were compromised by Aiwei. (And let’s not forget how Su’s first reaction was to question _my_ guards, the men and women whose loyalty to Zaofu was unimpeachable.) The Earth Queen had armies and Dai Li agents and scores of defenses and layers of ceremony as a defense, but a single airbender had cut through them all and ended her life, and with her death, the impregnable walls of Ba Sing Se came tumbling down and an empire of millennia crumbled soon after.

The way I see it now, the avatars have always been mistaken in their interpretation of the world. Balance is an ideal worth striving towards, but it does not exist naturally. Nature, as the physicists say, is simply of whorl of particles, bouncing and reacting with one another, accumulating into greater, more complex structures, until one day the entire universe will be a single unit, perhaps a great mind thinking solemn thoughts, knowing only peace.

For the next two months following the assassination, life in Zaofu went on as it had before. There were dinners and dance recitals and exchanges with the Zaofu societies, but there was a tension in the atmosphere, an edge to the proceedings. Above it all were the stories coming out across the rest of the kingdom; riots in Ba Sing Se, states declaring independence, army units lynching their officers and joining the mob. The world was ending, but all Su seemed to want was tend to her lawn and play with her meteorites.

Still, not everyone accepted the Matriarch edict’s so blithely. A “Zaofu society” of our own sprung up, mostly elder citizens and young radicals trying to figure out what to do. Bataar joined, and he soon asked me to come along. I have always given politics the cold shoulder, but in this situation I needed to do _something_ to stop the anxious churning in my gut. Initially, they were as fractious as any artists’ collective, but after some coaxing and strongarming, I managed to get them to agree on set of goals: assemble an expedition with Suyin at the head, fly to Ba Sing Se, restore order and take the mantle of government, and with the assistance of loyal army units and the international community restore order to the nation.

Looking back, it was a terrible plan, but ultimately it didn’t matter. In a closed meeting with President Raiko and Master Tenzin, Suyin categorically refused to be involved in any effort to pacify Ba Sing Se. I had contrived to get myself invited to the meeting as security and as a representative of the society, but even I was taken aback by Suyin’s refusal. I still can’t understand her. You can read the papers, see the burning palace, the Dai Li agents dangling from streetlights and decide to do _nothing_? That it is _not your problem_? At the time I called it cowardice, but lately I wonder if the problem might just be simple selfishness. Su had her city and her family; as far as she was concerned, the rest of the world could go burn.

Suffice to say, the society did not take this news lying down. Rather than wasting time on trying to convince someone who will never change her mind, we decided to cut out the middlewoman and build an expeditionary force ourselves. We all worked on our local circles: Bataar brought over Varrick and Zhu Li, who convinced a number of Zaofu’s industrial barons to come along. I spoke mostly among the guard; most were easily convinced, motivated by both by concern for Ba Sing Se and the residual ill feeling over Su’s treatment of them after the Red Lotus attack.

Somehow Su never found out about our preparations until the day of our launch. I don’t know why she decided to confront me at the dock; perhaps she thought I was still the little dancing orphan she could outargue into submission.  Unfortunately, threats are of little use when your offers are of no interest to the person you are trying to coerce. Zaofu was a home, but it was not _my_ home, and she had made it abundantly clear that staying would require sacrifices I and everyone else on this expedition were no longer capable of making. The part that astounded me, that still puzzles me today, is the fact that she did _nothing_ to stop us. We took most of the airships, but it could have been possible to force us down or lock the domes or even drag me away in cuffs. I knew the risks when we were planning this expedition, that we were coasting by on a prayer, but for Suyin to just stand there, insult me, and watch us go…I still don’t understand. Maybe I never will. As we ascended and as Zaofu shrunk down to a little steel toy in the Guanze Valley, I watched Su, glaring at the airships, dwindle down to a little particle, then become nothing at all.

 * * *

I’ve been having dreams lately. I normally don’t remember my dreams, but I remember this one. Or rather, parts of this one. Things are fading even as I type. I feel like I’ve had it before, but I don’t know if that’s true of or if it’s just a false memory implanted by the dream.

What I remember is chasing something. I’m in my normal uniform, with the strips and back panel attached, and I’m running after someone through a succession of abandoned locales. Sometimes it seems like a farm full of immense machinery, then a rusted factory with buzzing fuse boxes, flickering lights, and machines hammering on nothing, then into a small cramped town, looking like the lower class part of a major city, all fifty-year old third-storey jobs made of brick and mortar with blown out windows, collapsed stairs, and burnt-out apartments. I can’t get a good look at the person I’m running after. Most of the time it seems to be a woman; a tall woman in a tight saffron dress, then a shorter older one in green robes (or is it a man?), then a young one in blue and buckskins. I can never get a good look at the face; they’re always just turning a corner, ducking down an impossible space, or ascending on an elevator. I’ll keep making notes if I remember any more of it; it feels like there’s more that the waking world has snatched away.


	2. Eight Months That Shook The World

I am not one for nostalgia, but if there’s one thing I miss, it’s those two weeks aboard the airships as we made our way to Ba Sing Se. Even know, when the riches of a continent are offered to me on steel platters, I still remember how it all began, just our little party of soldiers and dreamers against the world. Varrick running a mile a minute about magnetic trains with Zhu Li translating him for the rest of us, Hong Li worrying over his armor and cables, his first trip outside of Zaofu, Lin Zhong fiddling with the radio, Gnatha Chavran the ex-pharmacist fussing over our supplies, always with sketchbook in hand, scribbling some distant desertscape. And finally, me and Bataar, spending the late summer evenings in bed, talking about what we would do and what we could build together. We were like Avatar Aang and his friends, a band of babes on a mission to save the world.

Allowing for prevailing winds, engine power, and the like, a voyage by airship from Zaofu to Ba Sing Se can be done inside of a week. Our own voyage took twice that as we skirted the eastern edge of the Si Wong desert, stopping at every port of call. Back in Zaofu, most reliable news from inside the kingdom dried up within a month of the assassination due to bandits and the newfound chaos of everyday life. What newspapers we got were filled with rumors and conjecture three weeks out of date, so during our journey we put down where we could, trading what little we could spare for the meagrest scraps of hearsay. The news we bought was contradictory and maddening; The Red Lotus has seized the city and were preaching revolution, the northern armies were on the march to the capital, Vaatu himself had erupted out of the Upper Ring and enslaved the people of the city to build his dark kingdom. We had better luck with the stragglers we picked up along the way; about three days into our journey we ran into an airship of Kyoshi warriors making their way to Ba Sing Se who agreed to join our party. We also picked up a few officers and men from tiny out-of-the-way forts on the edge of the desert. I’d worried about leaving these places unmanned when people would need them, but as Varrick so colorfully put it, after a month with no resupply, those refugees would start to look a lot like lunch.

***

I don’t know what any of us were expecting at Ba Sing Se. Indeed, for most of us the idea that the city could fall seemed like a storybook fancy. Ba Sing Se, the City of Twenty Million, The World City, was eternal. It was more than a city; it was the symbol of the Earth Kingdom and, if you were a follower of the philosopher Master Kang, it was a great metaphor for the mind, with layers of different functions all supporting one another to make something greater that the individual parts.

I still remember the morning we arrived. All of us, even Varrick, had awoken early to catch a glimpse of the city. We were all crammed together in the cockpit of _Zaofu Four_ , peering out into the purple dawn, the rising sun at our backs. As the city resolved into view, everything seemed just as usual. The outer wall stood proud, the farmlands it protected were pitted with little earth huts but otherwise in good health. For a moment, I allowed myself to think that maybe things weren’t as bad as the rumors had said, that the situation was not as dire as we had feared.

Then Zhu Li, who could see just a little farther than any of us, said in a whisper that filled the cockpit, “the walls are gone. But I think they’ve built new ones.”

As we reached the edge of the Lower Ring, we began to realize just what the past three months had wrought. One of the Avatar’s friends who was in the city when it fell said that a Red Lotus lavabender had melted the mortar of the walls, collapsing great sections through which the populace could run inward. Now, it seemed that the work had been completed, with not a trace of any inner wall left standing. Erasure was impossible, of course; the foundations still stood, and the entire city was so built around the divisions of the walls that the only way to erase them would be to bend the city back into the dirt and start anew. Still, the sight of seeing one of the wonders of the world completely demolished had a sobering effect on all of us.

(Hm. Between Ba Sing Se and the Northern Air Temple, I’ve witnessed three world wonders being destroyed. What does it say about this age that a person can even say that?)

Still, man is a territorial beast, and the chaos had led to the bending of new walls. However, these were small, shabby things, not even attempting to emulate the grandeur of the forefathers. They were blocky, irregular things, enclosing random agglomerations of city blocks in great swathes. I saw at least four major enclosures on our first pass, the largest of which engulfed the southern third of the lower ring, with the others subsuming various neighborhoods across all three rings. The effect was rather as if someone had taken a police map of gang territories in Ba Sing Se and built it in real life.

Which, I suppose, is exactly what happened.

***

We made our camp in the Hongqiao Aerodrome, just west of the city in the outer ring. It was the only place in the city big enough to support our airships, and it was far enough from the city and intact enough that we could defend it with only a token force. There were already a number of refugees living there; we housed those we could and they were grateful.

If this letter is meant to be an explanation and an organization of all that I have done, then let it also be a confession. During those first two weeks, as we were deploying and making the aerodrome into a suitable base, I came to realize a great and terrible truth: I had no idea how to save Ba Sing Se. The scale of the project daunted me; how could my little band of metalbenders and geniuses do anything against the city that had defeated Chin, Iroh, and Ozai? We were a battalion against how many millions; where could you even start? No one knew us, we had no supporters, no allies, no program. We had no food or shelter to give; hope and good wishes were our only currency. The more I tried to come up with some kind of plan, some way to do something, the more I ran up against the iron facts of our predicament. I even began to wonder if I should have taken the easy path, if I should have stayed in Zaofu like Suyin, doing my dances and making my rounds while the world crumbled.

In the end, it was Bataar who helped me solve my predicament. Indeed, I would say that everything that came afterwards was built on his simple suggestion: “Go to the palace.” While the various factions built their forts across the city and made the spaces between a no-man’s-land of bending fights and armored satos on patrol, the palace complex in the upper ring had been mostly abandoned after the initial wave of looting. There was still a picket force of Earth Kingdom soldiers guarding the place, but after some ostrich-horse trading it was easy enough for me and Bataar to get inside.

We decided to take the long route, landing just outside the Outer Court and making the long walk to the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the center of the former queen’s power. Even though the looters had moved to greener pastures, the palace complex still bore the scars of the initial assault. We walked through gates whose red walls had been scorched by fire, stepped around shards of priceless vases, and saw the torn scraps of parchments fluttering on the walls. The closer we got to the Hall, the more the damage seemed personal. The queen’s half-built temple had been forcibly collapsed, and someone had taken a particular dislike to her topiaries, having ripped out every one and crushed them together into a giant ball of snapped branches and mangled foliage.

Finally, after about a good half-hour’s walk, we arrived at the throne room. For all intents and purposes, little had changed since the first week after the queen’s death. The floor was still pitted with holes from the battle between the terrorists and the few Dai Li the queen was able to muster. Her body was long gone of course; to this day I don’t think anyone knows for sure what became of it. The looters had done their share of damage too. Many of the columns in the hall were cracked, and there were a few signs of people trying to bend earth huts to squat in before the soldiers chased them away. Most everything valuable or shiny had been stripped out of the room, and even the great badger-mole behind the throne had suffered the indignity of having people carve their names into his marble fur with pocketknives. We spent another hour there in silence, Bataar assessing the damage, me sitting on the dais right beside where the throne had been, just thinking about the queen, the Earth Kingdom, and me being there.

The moments that change us are odd things. They seem to come from within and without. A decision that changes a person can be the product of a rational line of development stretching back years, and yet without some spark, some essential magic or spirit or whatever, that inevitable decision would forever remain a mere potentiality. Philosophers and sages have argued about this for millennia, and I don’t pretend to know better than them. What I do know is that, sitting cross-legged on that wooden dais, listening to my breathing, I realized something I had known since I was a little girl but had never been able to articulate until now.

The Earth Kingdom was dead.

The Red Lotus had landed the killing blow, but it had died long, long ago. The sickness began when the kings turned their backs on the Mechanical Ages, on the new ideas coming out of the Water Tribes and the Fire Nation and sank into decadent routine. They let themselves become prisoners of their palaces, all while the Fire Nation grew in power, built colonies on our western shore, and made the push for world conquest. We _lost_ the Hundred Years War; the Fire Nation took our lands and subverted the walls of Ba Sing Se with the help of those who had sworn an oath to defend them. We were liberated by Avatar Aang, but his efforts were only a tourniquet on an internal wound. We continued to decay, retreating into private wealth, abandoning our families and children, hoping that our legacies would be strong enough to protect us.  But in the end, for all our armies, all our secret agents and nobles and bureaucrats, four terrorists broke into the Imperial Palace, sucked the air out of an old queen’s lungs, and no one did anything.

The Earth Kingdom was dead, but the Earth Nation was not. All around us the Second Mechanical Age was underway, filling the world with new machines and buildings. The United Republic, the Fire Nation, and the Northern Water Tribe were at the forefront, of course, but they had been ahead for a very long time. By contrast, we were a misused nation waiting to be born. We had the people, the education, and the machines. All we needed was the will, the drive to put the world to right. With the proper leadership, the Earth Nation could become the industrial and military juggernaut the likes of which the world had never seen. We could have beautiful cities, farms tended by traction-engines, deserts irrigated by canals. With a little time, we could even make it to the stars.

I left the throne barely able to contain myself, with poor Bataar asking if I was having some sort of fit. Once I’d calmed myself down enough to explain my insight, he thought it was the most amazing thing he had ever heard. I still remember what he told me: “Kuvira, we’ve been behind for centuries, but if we do this, we’ll catch up in a single bound.” Overnight our situation changed. We were no longer a loose collection of wanderers led astray by a dream; we were a political force, one whose gifts of metalbending could make us a powerful ally to anyone who agreed with our ideas.

Unfortunately, the political environment that had grown up in Ba Sing Se was not favorable to men and women of drive. Of the five major powers in the city, two were Terra Triad splinter gangs, and one was an old colonel named Shen who was a gangster in all but name. The only legitimate government the city had produced was what people had taken to calling the “Zemlat.” Taking over the Ba Sing Se Opera House in the early days of the chaos, a collection of republican activists had established a small representative council made up of citizens from all three rings. Led by the old exile Dr. Tsen, they prided themselves on being the new representative voice of the Earth Nation. What I noticed, when I was officially invited to watch a debate session, was a bunch of young men in cheap Republican suits more interested in scoring points off of each other than in coming to a consensus or actually pacifying the city, a job that they seemed to feel was entirely the responsibility of the loyalist commanders manning the barricades. Indeed, they seemed to have a particular contempt for military matters; one even went so far as to heap insults upon me, accusing me of repression, cruelty, and the like. Quite frankly, if this is what representative republican government has to offer, one wonders what was so bad about monarchy in the first place. As for the final faction, the People’s Assembly, I had no desire to deal with them. They were the political arm of the Red Lotus, out of the shadows and on the streets, promising freedom and equality. I saw what their “freedom” brings at the Northern Air Temple, so suffice to say, I hold no truck with child killers.

Two months after we landed, it looked like our expedition had reached another dead end. With our food running low and morale beginning to drop, I was planning on decamping and moving to another city to winter while we properly planned our next move. However, two days before we were ready to go, the spirits provided another miracle: an airship coming down from the north, making its way to the Imperial Palace. That one ship was followed by another, and another, then three more, until the sky was blotted out by airships. Not just pleasure craft; personnel transports, heavy equipment transports, rapid-response skimmers with their wide doors to support vertical insertions, all making their way to the palace.

The Northern Army had arrived.

***

We never talked much about the Northern Army in Zaofu. Su had never had much patience for police or soldiers at the best of times, and the Northern Army represented everything that was anathema to her: a fully-modernized, politically active army with only a nominal loyalty to the Earth Queen. In spite of this I had always been fascinated with the army, both as an example of what could have been in a better world, but also because of the General Ailing Fengtian, the woman who stood at its head.

I suppose it was only in this age of decline that she became who she was. While the rest of the world has never had any problems with men and women fighting together, the Earth Kingdom has always been rather retrograde in these matters. Indeed, the rumor around her was that she’d only gotten the job because of a court intrigue between the queen and the former head of the Northern Army, a General Kim. However, she took to the position like a turtleduck to water, modernizing and reequipping the army and leading it to victory against the Northern Triads. If anyone wanted to rule the Earth Kingdom, they had to deal with her.

We returned to the Imperial Palace a week after her armada had arrived to pay a courtesy call. The tenor of the whole place had changed. The walls still bore their scars, but the buildings were alive with the hum of men and machines, of war vehicles being uncrated and generators being revved up, of petty officers bawling for supplies and sergeants barking orders, all around the glorious sounds of work and purpose, of things being _done_. Me and Bataar met her in the former headquarters of the Council of Five, poring over rescrawled maps of the city. Our meeting defied expectations; though firmly in middle age, Ailing was a vivacious woman, surprisingly warm and personable for someone in her position. Not once did she condescend to me, rather she was quite impressed with what we had done, and admitted that she’d always been an admirer of Suyin in spite of their political differences. I spent the next few days at her camp, getting to know her and her army, and the more I saw the more I felt it was these people, this woman, that could built the new Earth Nation I’d dreamt. By the end of the week, I had signed an alliance with her, and the Zaofu expeditionary force began working with the Northern Army to pacify the city.

The next month and a half was dedicated to fighting the bandits and triads strongholds that had sprung up around the city. It was the first serious fighting most of us from Zaofu had ever seen, and we paid dearly for each lesson we learned. We dropped our robes for NA uniforms to keep us more mobile in a confined environment. I was a master with the zip line, but as we fought I began to find it a limiting weapon, always needing spooling and unspooling to be effective. Bataar helped me out by ditching the lines and bashing together a set of arm and leg braces that could hold metal strips I could cast off and manipulate. They more than proved their worth in the fight against Colonel Shen, when I managed to drag him out of a getaway sato with a strip around his wrists. (Poor man thought the spirits were taking him away!)

And yet as more of the city came under our control, I began to feel the old doubts again. Ailing was growing especially anxious about the Zemlat, and it was looking like we’d be moving in to suppress it at some point. At the same time, she was spending more and more time meeting with old royal officials, including Grand Secretary Gun, of all people. I was kept out of the loop, but I’d heard whispers from Lin Zhong that Ailing was making a play for the throne. The news stung; rather than the hope of a new tomorrow, she was just another gangster on the make for the biggest prize of all.

I don’t know what I would have done had we been forced into a showdown, because the decision was taken away from us. Unbeknownst to any of us, the People’s Assembly, true to their origins as a force of chaos, had reacted to the Northern Army’s advances by resorting to terror. Great barrels packed with blasting jelly were transported all across the city, hidden as wine casks or the like, in the hopes of wiping out most of the major players in one night of fire. They even had the courtesy to send us one, though the deliveryman was discovered before he could cross the main gate. Sadly, Ailing Fengtian was not so lucky, and she was killed along with eighteen of her other officers in conference when the bomb tore the council building apart.

After hearing the blasts rock the city, I got on the radio to report to Ailing. What I got was a frightened lieutenant, barely out of his teens, raving about the blast and the death of the officers. As he spoke, I felt the hand of one of those moments of destiny on my shoulder yet again. The Northern Army was the greatest power in the Earth Kingdom, but it was weak, held together with personal connections that had now been severed. We were on the verge of pacifying Ba Sing Se, but if the army fractured now, we would fail before the Red Lotus. The army would decay into another collection of brigands, civil war would blight the land, and we would have to wait another twenty, thirty, forty years before order was restored. The cost would be unthinkable.

Right now, at this moment, someone had to step up and save the world. And on that day, that someone was me.

I calmed the lieutenant down, got him to coordinate triage and damage assessment, and told him to prepare for our arrival. In a truly phenomenal effort we packed up the entire aerodrome in the space of a few hours and decamped for the Imperial Palace. The scene was still chaotic when we arrived, but we put things back into a semblance of order quickly. No one argued when I gave the order that I would be assuming provisional command of the Northern Army in Ba Sing Se; I think everyone was just glad someone was giving orders.

The next five months were the hardest yet, trying to integrate the Zaofu forces with the Northern Army while waging a final campaign against the People’s Assembly. They had distanced themselves from the attack, claiming it was the work of rogue agents, but at that point no was cared to listen. They had abetted a campaign of terror, and they would be met with terror. The fighting grew particularly vicious, with ambushes, assassinations, and hostages being the order of the day. Meanwhile, the Army veterans grumbled and moaned about the “Zaofu dandies” taking over. A few left, but not enough to weaken our resolve. By the time the Hengsha building fell in the spring, the Red Lotus had been driven from the city, the army was unified like never before, and with the gracious permission of the Zemlat, the Northern Army was recognized as the governing authority of Ba Sing Se, with Supreme Commander Kuvira at its head.

We had our city, but the country still waited.

***

More of the dream has come back to me. I’m still chasing after that illusive figure, but I finally know that I am in the Middle Ring of Ba Sing Se. However, I only know this in that eerie way dream knowledge is imparted intuitively, because nothing about this city resembles what I remember about Ba Sing Se. The city is now made up of great three-storey facades narrowly packed together on cramped paved streets, giving the impression of a single large building that spans the entire block rather than of discrete units. I can’t recognize the style the buildings are in; it seems imposing and monolithic, and there are a reliefs here and there, but it resembles nothing I’ve seen in any Earth Kingdom city. The city is crammed with wires, transmission lines for a tram network hanging overhead, power lines hanging from cylindrical junctions on every second corner, and oven-sized boxes on the ground with phone lines spilling out of them. There are no people in this city; everywhere there are signs of desolation, of satos overturned, of trams derailed, of barricades hastily set up and great smoking pits where gas lines have exploded, but there is not a single soul save for the person I am chasing. She seems farther away now. I’ll reach a roundabout dominated by a statue I can’t recognize and just catch her hoofing up a flight of stairs, or I’ll look up at some odd spiral-steel construction and see her running along an elevated highway. I sense that she’s running deeper into the city, to the Inner Ring, but I have no idea what I will find there in this inhuman city, or if I will ever catch up with her.


	3. The Years of War and Consolidation

With our victory over the Assembly, Varrick and a number of the leading citizens from the Zemlat put together a “Week of National Unity” to celebrate and act as a sop to morale. It was a celebration unlike anything Ba Sing Se had seen since the end of the Hundred Years War. It was nothing like an imperial coronation, one of those solemn ceremonies of oaths and processions that drag on for hours upon hours. It was as if the entire city had become a giant university, and the people were a freshmen class enjoying their first flush of freedom. There was street theater, poetry readings, and more free-flowing liquor than anyone thought possible. The strangest part of it all was that all of it was directed at me. Across the city, banners and posters were thrown up of me (or at least of a woman with a crude approximation of my face) in a variety of martial poses bearing slogans like “A New Age Calls For A New Woman,” “The Maiden Warrior of Ba Sing Se,” and “All Hail The Great Uniter,” an old title from Chin the Conquerer’s day. It’s a very strange feeling to see your face plastered everywhere and your name on the everyone’s lips. I’ve meant to ask Gnatha if she had anything to do with it, but for one reason or another I never found the time.

Barring a few speeches, I had to forgo the celebrations, for we had a new task at hand: having won the city, we now had to rule it. No easy task, particularly for a collection of twenty-somethings whose total life experience was a year of urban combat. For physical space, we left the ruined Imperial Palace for Ba Sing Se University. It had been mostly abandoned in the fighting, it had the physical space for our ministries, and with a few walls bent up it could become a secure compound, of the city but apart from it. For government we settled on a hybridization of the city’s government and of Zaofu’s _yuan_ system. The Zemlat would handle most of the normal functions of government as both the Legislative and Executive Yuans, but departments vital for the defense of the nation were bundled into separate Yuans. Most of these went to other Zaofu veterans; Gnatha got the Security Yuan, old Mister Hong got the Technical-Industrial Yuan, and I maintained command of the army as the Supreme Commander. There were a number of legislators from the Zemlat who were less than pleased with the new arrangement, accusing me of all manner of black tyranny. Fortunately, a brief lockout managed to convince the majority to support the new system.

Their change of heart was timely, for within our second month of power the first major crisis was upon us. After our victory, most of the provinces around Ba Sing Se pledged their allegiance to us, grateful for the existence of a central government again. One of these, Honsi, on the northern shore of Chameleon Bay, was ravaged by both banditry and a brutal winter and was staring an all-out famine in the face. They didn’t have the money to buy grain, and most of the surrounding provinces didn’t have grain to sell or the means to deliver it. I confess I handled the situation badly. At the time, with the stress of assembling a new government and the growing split in the Northern Army, I dropped the whole issue in Gnatha’s hands and told her to fix it. Her solution, as it turned out, was to send trainloads of hard-faced men in leather jackets out to the withholding provinces, physically take the grain from whatever farmers they found, and ship it back to Honsi. The whole situation was ugly; some farmers burnt their grain or attacked Security men, fire- and waterbenders received the brunt of the abuse, and it’s only by the barest miracle we avoided a full scale revolt in the provinces selected for “requisition.” Still, the crisis was a wakeup call to us in power. We were a half-ruined city and a collection of half-starved provinces with pretentions of statehood. We needed help.

While securing Ba Sing Se had granted us recognition as the official new government of the Earth Kingdom by the rest of the world, we had yet to see what such recognition would bring us. In spite of the advice of just about everyone, I handled the negotiations personally, feeling that seeing the woman who had actually _saved_ Ba Sing Se personally make an appearance would be worth a few concessions.

I started with the Water Tribes, hoping that the memory of the Grand Alliance would be worth a few coins. I developed a great rapport with the Southern Ambassador Amaruq; as the youngest son of former Chief Sokka and a Kyoshi Warrior, he had a great love of the Earth Kingdom, and was a cheery old fellow with a booming laugh and great shaggy mustaches. Prime father material, you could say. Sadly, in spite of his cheer, the recent chaos surrounding the civil war and Harmonic Convergence had left the Southern Tribe with little more than some food to trade. The negotiations with the Northern Tribe were less encouraging; a hatchet-faced woman named Councilor Piujuq kept rambling on about loan repayments we couldn’t make. The negotiations with the Fire Nation were the worst of all. I confess I harbor that grudge against the Fire Nation that all earthbenders have, but I’ve known a few firebenders in my time, and they’ve all been brave, upstanding people. However, Ambassador Kuroki of the Fire Nation now has the dubious honor of being the most frustrating person I have ever dealt with in my life. Most of the time she affected this air of condescending superiority when talking to me, only to drop it and withdraw into silence when I pushed back. Half the time I was afraid she was going to start crying. I still can’t tell if she was playing some high-level diplomatic stratagem I was completely missing, or if she was a neurasthenic who was given the job as a family favor.

With all other avenues yielding few results, that left only one more potential ally: the United Republic of Nations. I’ll admit that I don’t like the Republic very much. The entire nation is built on the great trading provinces of the old Earth Kingdom, and when they seceded we lost a great financial and commercial outlet to the world. The great trading city of Taku was sacked by the Fire Nation in the early years of the Hundred Years War, and it was never rebuilt because the Republic took all its business and citizens. Beyond the historical, I’ve always found something unseemly about the Republic. Their skyscrapers gobble the land and sprout like weeds, everyone there needs to be a “business-man” of some description, and they all seem to adore these unnatural too-white billboard-poster smiles. They make a great show of how they are a nation of peace and tolerance, yet five years ago a masked fanatic came to power and almost ushered in a genocidal campaign against all benders. If the future is a choice between them and Zaofu, then I’ll take my chances with Suyin.

The representative from the Republic was about what I expected, a former timber magnate and “close personal friend” of President Raiko’s named Tse’en Huang. An oily man with a terrible  pencil mustache, he surprised me by presenting a proposal of his own, something he called the “Twelve Points.” The majority of it was exactly what we needed; free trade and generous loans, food for our citizens, efforts to return displaced persons, fulsome declarations of peace and justice. On the surface it was a gift from the spirits, three sheets of paper that solved our problems.

It was the final five points, however, that tipped his hand. United Republican “advisors” would be dropped into Ba Sing Se to “assist” in governing the nation. The United Forces would receive basing rights all along our northern and western coasts, and United Republicans would take majority control in a number of joint mining and railroad ventures all across the Kingdom. Finally, In order to get all this aid, the Earth Kingdom would have to become a monarchy again, and I would be reduced to a caretaker, leaving power after the Kingdom was reunified. I spent the evening in seclusion with my inner circle: me, Bataar, Gnatha, and Lin, who was now heading up the Intelligence Ministry. It was her, of all people, that suggested I take the deal. Her sources in Republic City were suggesting that Raiko was overplaying his hand, that there was no real conception of what the situation in the Earth Kingdom was, and that we could play this deal to our advantage. With her assurances and with no better options, I took the deal, and the Supreme Commander became “the Provisional President of the Earth Kingdom,” a nonsense title if there ever was one.

In the end, it turned out that Lin had made the right call. Some Republicans ended up in Ba Sing Se, but Gnatha was able to get Varrick to give them the runaround. We kept the issues of the bases and military aid buried in committee, and gave them their mines and railways for the time being. I was pilloried in the press, of course, accused of “betraying the National Revolution,” but I didn’t care. I had my promises, my money, and now I had a nation to win.

By this point, most of the insurrections had settled into several open rebellions. In the northwest, General Tuan had broken from the Northern Army after I had taken power and held several provinces. To the far south, Admiral Yen had absconded with most of the Southern fleet, including one of our two Water-Tribe-built battleships and made himself a pirate king of the southern and eastern islands. And to the west, the Omashu Republic had risen its head again, an ephemeral feature of every period of unrest in Earth Kingdom history. Of course, we were not resting on our laurels either. In the months since our victory, I had been working to unify the Zaofu expedition and the Northern Army into a single unit. To melt ourselves into them, most of our troops began training theirs in the arts of metalbending; a short crude regimen by necessity, but many of them picked up the basics of the ziplines quickly enough. I also saw fit to introduce political education and study sessions, to educate the army of the ideals for which they would be fighting. The Northern Army already had an impressive technological base of armored satos, rhomboid landships, and light aeroplanes, and with Varrick’s efforts we soon integrated avatar mechs and magrail artillery. We even redid the uniforms, replacing the tan-and-green with Zaofu’s greens and silvers and adopted the Zaofu coin as the emblem of our new Army of National Reunification.

The centerpiece of our campaign would be the monorails. Building our reunification campaign around them was my idea to both practically and symbolically unify the nation. Starting in Ba Sing Se, a metalbending fly gang would head out across the country laying down track, while a train bearing a commander would follow behind to show the flag and put a face to the new government. It was an incredible drain on resources, and even Bataar thought I had gone too far, but I was convinced nothing would demonstrate the strength of our movement to people like seeing a train filled with soldiers humming into a new port of call, engine shining and cars aglow with light.

Finally, in the late fall, all the preparations had been made. The first gangs and gone off months ahead laying track down everywhere they could, and we had three trains under our command. The _Hammer_ , General Ming’s train, would be heading north to deal with Tuan, while Hong Li would be riding south in the first train Varricorp delivered, the _Earth Unity_. As for myself, Bataar and I would be riding the _Storm of Steel_ to Omashu itself. At the time, I told myself and the public that my personal participation in the campaign was for symbolic reasons, for the new leader to journey to the ancestral home of earthbending to bring it into the fold. When I think about it know, I think the real reason was simple restlessness. I had been spending months caught behind desks or in sitting rooms, not even begin able to get in a decent workout. I need to move to think properly, and everything in Ba Sing Se was just draining me.

Before we set out, we picked up an old acquaintance. Bolin, one of Avatar Korra’s friends, had arrived in Ba Sing Se and approached me asking for a job. Given his status as a mover star, I gave him an honorary commission and brought him along with us, hoping the natural charisma of Nuktuk, Hero of the South, would do some us some good. As for Korra herself, he’d had no word from her, and I suspect he was looking for something to do to keep his mind off things. He’s not the brightest lamp, but he’s a nice boy, and I can see why Opal was sweet on him.

The journeys each of us took across the Earth Kingdom are now a matter of public record. You can go into a library and read papers about Ming’s battles in the forest, or about Hong Li’s innovation of using torpedo-armed light boats in conjunction with aeroplanes to bring down Yen’s heavier cruisers. (Something to consider: we can either pay for an army or a navy but not both. Perhaps we should forgo heavy ships and invest in torpedo boats and submarines. Rather than defeat other navies, deny them access to our shores and harass their convoys.) For the _Storm of Steel_ , we set off at a leisurely pace, riding through the provinces south of the city, through the tunnel built under the Serpent’s Pass, paying courtesy calls at various villages and towns along the way. Most everyone was excited to see us, and were amazed at the machines we brought along. Already I could start to see some of the good we were doing; towns were pitching together to build the monorail, and I was already starting to see “Great Uniter” posters in the bigger towns. There’s one girl I remember in particular, this child of about fourteen, who approached me, in a homemade green tunic and black riding pants, who said that because of my example, she had joined one of the Young Citizens brigades and had been working hard to collect scrap metal and agitate for the new nation. The most remarkable thing about her, though, was that she had drawn a beauty mark under her right eye with a makeup pencil. As I told Bataar that evening, if the spirits could guarantee me a daughter like _that_ , I might be more amenable to children in general.

The further south we sped, the fewer villages we saw, and the more we were harassed by the forces of Omashu. It started out with hit-and-run raids, mostly aimed at cutting the tracks, but the closer we got the Gangtze River, we began to see armor and aeroplanes, and I called a halt to wait for support from our more traditional armored trains. This civil war business isn’t like what you read about with the Hundred Years War. Nobody can field a decent army, so it’s all little sniping actions and cruel reprisals against civilians until you hit a choke point. In the dead of winter, we hit our first choke point at Gaipan Bridge. It was a ferocious affair, with magrails winging steel shells across the bridge, airplanes dueling with one another, trying to keep one another from getting a bomb off, and Omashu earthbenders trying to snipe at our metalbenders as they ziplined around and through the bridge’s supports. Thankfully we were able to keep them from blowing the bridge before driving them off, and we were able to proceed further south.

Five days later, we were at the gates of Omashu. I use “gates” figuratively; the city is famous for its isolation and inaccessibility. As luck would have it, the bulk of Citizen Bihari’s army had been caught north of the bridge, ravaging the provinces while trying to secure a land route to the United Republic. With the upper hand momentarily gained, I decided to take a different tack. To the city, I broadcast a message that while their rebellion was not tolerated, if Bihari and her ministers would surrender peacefully, swear an oath of loyalty to me, and accept supervision by my military, they could keep their posts and the city would be spared any further harm. To drive the point home, after a warning I ordered my artillery to train their rails on the old palace the Fire Nation had built a century ago and demolish it. The shells, ingots of pure steel accelerated to supersonic speeds by the magnetic rails, tore the old palace to splinters. The point was made, and the Bihari herself came out to swear her loyalty to me. With the heart of the rebellion cut out, the armies in the north surrendered piecemeal over the next several weeks.

By the end of the second year after the collapse, me, Ming, and Li, had managed to conclude our campaigns to a satisfactory degree and bring about two-fifths of the old provinces back into the fold. Unfortnately, for every general who surrendered, another one and a bandit chief sprung up to replace him. Thankfully, most of them appeared on the periphery, and had no hope of ultimate victory. Still, there were a number of close calls. There was the “Weekend Revolt” in Ba Sing Se, when a cabal of Northern officers got in contact with some disgruntled ex-legislators and seized several key building, including Gnatha’s Security Yuan. That thankfully fizzled out; as Lin so eloquently put it, “We sat around waiting for someone to arrest us, but no one came, so we decided to arrest you instead.” Far more intractable were the bandits in the north. Energized by the doctrines of the Red Lotus and enraged by both nobles and soldiers alike, they formed a shadowy republic, powerless outside its borders but impervious to conventional assault. We broke them, but even today I worry about the price we paid to bring them down.

In between the major crises, me and Bataar traveled across every part of the Earth Kingdom, showing the flag, putting rebels and bandits in their place, occasionally speeding back to the capital to deal with some new crisis in my absence. There is a lot that I am thankful to have seen, and there is a lot I never want to see again. For now, though, the hour is drawing late, and tomorrow will be, as it always is, another busy day.

***

I had the dream again. There was more to it this time, something I’ve never seen before.

The first thing I remember is that I’ve made it to the Upper Ring, and I am looking out at the entirety of Ba Sing Se. Once again, it looks nothing like the city from the waking world. The whole place is made of those featureless blocks punctuated with the occasional human statue or eight-storey high-rise, all garbed in a snowy-white concrete. There are elevated pathways for tramlines and massive highways, similarly rendered in concrete. Once again, not a single person stirs. I turn around, wondering why I’m seeing something I’ve already seen before, and then I see _it_.

The Tower. Capitalized.

It is an immense cylinder, centered right where the Imperial Palace is supposed to be, soaring hundreds of feet into the air and plunging deep into the earth. Indeed, most of the upper ring has been excavated (blasted away more like, judging by the pattern on the rocks) to support the tower. The tower itself in again in that unfamiliar style, but there seems to be more definition to it. The concrete seems greyer, like there was some different stone used in the mixture, and there are pieces of metal framework set in the base of the tower. Some of it looks like scaffolding, but I also see an immense framework topped by some sort of pulley mechanism who purpose I cannot fathom. Were they building this tower, only to be caught in some sort of catastrophe that forced the evacuation of the city? Was this tower even built, or did it somehow grow into an artificial structure from some malevolent seed in a catacomb beneath the city? The more I puzzle out the tower, the more I see little hints of recognizable features, the echo of the levels of an imperial temple or the delicate arch of a pagoda. The most recognizable feature is, of course, at the very apex of the tower, which is topped by a giant Zaofu coin. The size of it is boggling; something that size of solid metal would warp in short order, but there are no welds or rivets that I can see from down here.

What I can see from down here, however, are twelve great supports, each the width of a locomotive and made of steel, anchoring the tower to the sides of its chasm. At least, I assume the supports are steel, because each one of them is engulfed in wires. Wires as thick as a man’s arm spring out of the earth in great junction boxes, eighty to a hundred per box, and twine their way around each support all the way to the outside of the tower, where they vanish in hundreds of tiny ports.

At this point, it seems my journey is nearing its conclusion, so I begin to walk around the pit, looking for some way to break into the alien tower. My first thought is to simply hop on one of the supports and clamber my way across, but as I approach a junction box, the idea shrivels in my head. I can hear the wires humming, but it’s not the normal hum of an electrical device. There’s something dynamic and multitextured about the hum. If I listen for a minute, I can start to whispers, voices, singing, the sounds of tongues slapping against cheeks, moaning, guttural breathing, all mixed together and attuned at a pitch and speed too low to understand properly. I start to feel sick (can you feel nauseous in a dream?), and I back off, looking for another way into the monolith.

Fortunately, in the distance, about a quarter of the way clockwise around the tower, I spy what looks like an elevated tram line granting access into the tower. I make my way down to the station, down an earthen ramp than seems surprisingly well built considering the situation. I finally make my way to a cargo loading area filled with boxes just outside the station, where a tram is waiting placidly in its berth, waiting to take another passenger to the high beyond. Just as I board, my foot snags on something, and I look down to see a bolt of green cloth, moth-eaten and covered in rock dust. I bend some of the dust off to find that it is an ANR uniform, one with three silver chevrons on the left arm. I should know who this jacket belongs to, but nothing comes to me. I glance around, wondering in my quarry has left this jacket to somehow get the drop on me, but there’s no one there. I am alone in the tram station.

With that, I drop the jacket onto the seat, pull the level on the forward panel, and watch as the tram inches forward and the great tower fills the entirety of my view.


	4. Tomorrow and Tomorrow

The problem with life, in my opinion, is that nothing is ever solved. Every solution you offer, every plan you put forward to resolve everything situation ideally forever, either spirals out of control or is ignored by others wanting to use you for their own ends. It’s enough to make you want to run into the woods and become an anarchist plotter, but that’s no way to live. We are judged by our actions, not ourselves, and our worth is determined by what we have done for the world.

Still, it is hard to not get frustrated. Case in point, the latest news Lin has scoured from Republic City. (It was a brilliant idea she and Gnatha had, really, of dropping agents into the Zaofu societies in the United Republic to reform them into a political pressure group to both influence Republican politics and act as a legal cover for our intelligence and security operations.) It seems that Raiko has been getting cold feet about this pseudocolonial plan of his and he’s pushed the coronation up six months. He’s even got the perfect mark: a halfwit half-cousin named Wu who was dumped in a Republican hotel for lack of anything better to do with him years before the chaos began. Naturally, this throws the plan Bataar and the inner circle cooked up out the window. If we had gotten our time, reunified the whole nation, we could have held one of those plebiscites the Republicans are so fond of, confirmed me as President and Supreme Commander, and inaugurated the Union of Earth States. As a result, we are going to have to do this quick and sloppy and look like the villains of the piece, while Raiko gets to sweep his Twelve Demands under the rug.

Lately I’ve been finding myself wondering more and more about what should be done with the United Republic. I don’t particularly _like_ them as a society, but that is hardly a reason to start a war of conquest. The absorption of the Republic is something that’s been a key note of every Earth nationalist since the Harmony Restoration movement sputtered out, but I do what’s right for the nation, not what some bearded ferrophobe thinks would be good.

Right now, the ideal solution would be to compel the Republic to a permanent neutrality, if not a permanent alliance. Given Raiko’s personality, I feel force may be the only thing to get him to listen to reason. The question is what force should be applied. We have an immense army, but it runs on Republican subsidies and is fueled by Earth Nation bodies. If we move against him, we starve our national reconstruction efforts to feed a bunch of men doing nothing but glaring menacingly across the border. Economic warfare is an even riskier prospect, particularly when our own finances are in such a deplorable condition.

Something Bataar said the other night may be a solution. He said he’d been looking at a sketch Varrick had done of a heavy closed-cabin aeroplane built for hauling cargo long distances. With a few modifications, he’d converted the plane into a bombing platform that could carry several hundred pounds of munitions and drop them out of a special hatch in the belly. With enough of these planes, deployed in aerodromes spread across the country, with skilled pilots and engines capable of traversing continents, no nation on earth would dare attack us without fearing their own armies and cities coming under siege by the skies above. Such an armada might even give an Avatar pause.

As I told him, the idea has merit, but once again time is against us. Developing these planes and training these pilots will take time, money, and resources, and what’s to stop the rest of the world from building better planes than us first? Perhaps I’ll look into Varrick’s work; he’s been champing at the bit to take a look at some spirit vines, and this “coronation” will be the ideal opportunity to acquire a few samples.

However, there is a greater cloud on the horizon than even the Republic: Zaofu. In all the time we’ve spent fighting and building, Su has stayed in her city and refused our entreaties. Now all but a handful of provinces have joined us, and still she remains in the city. What are you doing, Su? You’re one of the last holdouts, and you don’t have the historical privilege of Kyoshi Island to merit special treatment. Is this a grudge over me leaving? Over taking Bataar? You have people whose lives depend on you, Suyin. Why won’t you do _something_?

There’s also been smaller rumblings as of late. We’ve been getting more reports of airbenders offering aid around the southern provinces. I am _tempted_ to say that all this is just Tenzin’s charity, but I can’t help but wonder if Raiko is behind this. Rather more concerning are the rash of Avatar sightings in the north. Avatar sightings are nothing new in the Earth Kingdom, of course, but given how these ones lack the traditional golden beard and flowing robes, I am more willing to take them seriously. This issue is even more worrying; avatars can make or break nations, but they do so openly. This whisper game is both out of character for the avatar and for Korra.

As I said, the more problems are resolved, the more arise.

***

My week of non-vacation has ended, and I am back on the _Storm of Steel_ , speeding our way to the province of Yi to get another declaration of loyalty and to root out the local bandit infestation. (The one good thing about being in Raiko’s pocket is that I have the freedom to call any of my opponents “bandits,” even if they run separate governments, and have the rest of the world accept that declaration as fact.) I feel no more rested or collected than before, and all I have to show for it is a pile of rambling letters to no one. What did I learn, really? That your work defines you, and my work is to give the people of the Earth Nation a better tomorrow? That most people will betray or disappoint or hurt you, and than you are the only person you can rely on? That nothing is as simple as it appears, and you must have hope to get through? I already knew all that long ago.

Still, as I look around this train, scribbling this last entry below my typewritten notes, I wonder just how far all of us have come. Bolin, Varrick, and Zhu Li seem the same as they ever were, but Bataar has grown from an unassuming young man into someone willing to throw his weight around (a hidden side effect of our exercise program) with a bit more of a temper than I remember. The last I saw of Gnatha, she spent her time strutting around in a Security jacket with her hair lacquered back, gazing at the world through hooded eyes. Lin barely speaks, but just jots forever in her endless supply of notebooks. I’m the only one who doesn’t feel like she’s changed, but is that even true?

Well, no matter. All that matters is the work, and right now we are so close to completion. Zaofu will join us, the Republic will be dealt with, and the world will see the emergence of a new Earth Nation (Earth Union? Earth Empire?), ready to take up her reins and lead the world into a new tomorrow.

***

I ride on the tram with no incident and find myself in a station mirroring the one I started from, save for a door leading to a catwalk. I pass down a ladder, onto a small maintenance trolley that takes me past unfathomable machines that seem to draw power out of lava. I recall going through corridors of machines canting and decanting canisters, filled with a quiet hum that rises to a series of whispers and buzzes, and then I am off on another elevator, staring at a jet of white light, ascending with it to the top of the tower. This isn’t technology; none of it could be fathomed by a human mind. These are spiritual engines, dream devices, the toys of otherworldly beings, or they are the idealized forms of some crude representation in the real world. I don’t even know anymore.

Eventually, I find the final elevator and I ride it to the top, to what I think is just below the great coin. As the door opens, I find myself in an immense chamber, presumably taking up the entire width of the tower at this point. The light from the elevator pools out and up a wide staircase, which my gaze follows until I see…

Her.

She sits fifty feet high at the shoulder, comfortably ensconced on an immense throne. She’s wearing a uniform, but it’s a simple one of a collared jacket, pants, and boots. Her hair is slicked back to curl under her ears, and she is wearing a set of armless glasses that pinch the bridge of her nose. At least, that’s what she appears to be; both her body and clothes seem to be cast out of bronze. As my eyes take in more of the room, I realize that her great concrete throne has wires, wires of every description and grade, every wire I have seen in my journey through this warped city, all of them feeding into her throne and through it into her.

I look up again. In the time I took to look down, her eyes have shifted down to me. Through the alloys it seems as if there is something watering in there, as if something is trying to communicate with me, impart some sort of message about her identity or the meaning of this place. I glance back down again, catching a glint from a slight chip under her right eye, then back-

And then I woke up.


End file.
